381–389 of 389 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone uses the European debit cards with chip/pin Actually, everyone uses Dutch debit cards with Chip+PIN. Colleagues and I had trouble using debit cards from other EU countries on our last visit.
Maestro/VPay cards should work fine. Debit MasterCard/Visa Debit is the issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t buy things with cash if there where a half way decent debit card or similar I could replace it with. It needs to have real transaction authentication so I don’t have to deal with fraud and it needs to decline transactions when I actually don’t have enough money in the account (instead of charging $40 in fees.) That’s it, but no one seems to offer that so I use cash instead.
Chime? If your balance isn't enough to cover the debit charge, the debit charge is declined, no fees. And you can enable/disable the card in app. And it's part of a fee free ATM network, app finds the nearest free ATM or cash back business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big one there that jumps out at me is "child care", in terms of things that are somewhat discretionary (in the sense that stay-at-home parenting is a thing). And at $10-30k per year per child depending on where you are in the US, it's a pretty large-ticket item.
Well let’s take me. Stay at home parenting... assumes I make enough money to cover her, the child, and her retirement, and medical. Which is 70-80k that she is providing right now. So We either take an 80k hit or 30k hit. It’s pretty simple these days. I’m pushing a household income of close to 200k and I haven’t been on vacation in 3 years. I could make a shitload sure, drop the wife, move into a studio and eat rame…
All I was saying above is that I am not surprised that a large fraction of households _are_ in that bucket as defined in the United Way report, because child care is expensive. And I expect the fraction of households in that bucket would likely be a lot smaller if "child care" were not being included in basic life necessities.
I am not going to comment on your personal financial situation; you are obviously a better judge of that than I am! I certainly know people with 200k household incomes who also have significant fixed expenses (student loans, medical expenses, whatever) that lead to them not having as much disposable income as one might think. But that's not really related to the United Way study.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chime? If your balance isn't enough to cover the debit charge, the debit charge is declined, no fees. And you can enable/disable the card in app. And it's part of a fee free ATM network, app finds the nearest free ATM or cash back business.
That sounds almost like what I'm looking for but it sounds like you still have to share an ID number (enough to pull money from the account) with everyone in order to use it.
I have a Citicard that generates one time virtual card numbers for online payments. It's a really neat idea but with a painful interface that makes it impractical. I'd like to get a virtual number for each merchant that has a user configurable credit line and can be used multiple times. That way I'd have a unique card on file with each online merchant, with its own credit limit set by me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it. My MasterCard is 2% cashback (through points, but that just means I batch it), but has an annual fee of $150 for two cards, and a minimum household income. I need to spend $7500 on the card just to break even, but if I funnel nearly all my expenses through the card I can net $1000 or more a year. These "rewards" come from the merchant, in the form of higher fees, and because the merchant can't discrimin…
There are many zero fee 2% cash back cards available in the USA. Why pay fees?
https://www.greedyrates.ca/blog/best-cash-back-credit-card-c...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in The Netherlands you basically can't use credit cards for offline purchases. Everyone uses the European debit cards with chip/pin. The fees are very low too, it's cheaper to process than cash is.
Conversely in Sweden all debit cards are VISA/MasterCard so credit cards work literally everywhere
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Time is one of the biggest ones, you have to have someone (normally a manager) dedicated to cash management before opening and after closing. When I eat with a group of people, it's very common that I'm the only one who pays cash. It's also very common that taking care of my bill is the fastest of them all. It's easiest on the wait-persons time. But since the owners generally fuck over the wait staff anyway, it's…
In America, paying with cash is so much faster because of the still way too common and outdated process for credit cards: Bring bill to customer > walk away while they review > return to collect card > go to fixed portal to run transaction > return to customer with receipt > walk away again > return to collect receipt with tip amount More restaurants need to start adopting handheld terminals for waitstaff, which redu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The charge is to the merchant, not to the customer. In general, the price marked on the good factors in the credit card fees, because almost everyone uses credit cards. So, if a buyer uses cash or a debit card, he should always negotiate for a 1-2% discount. Edit: To clarify, some U.S. merchants do charge a "credit card fee" or enforce a minimum charge amount to all customers using credit cards for their purchases. I…
Indeed, Ikea in Brooklyn offers 1% discount if you pay with a debit card; didn't check elsewhere but likely it's the same in their stores over the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go to any place in northern Europe and it's basically only card.
Where exactly, because I've been to ask the Scandinavian countries in the past couple of years and I paid taxis with cash in all occasions For everything else, yes, mostly cards